Methodology

Introducing Shuv: Automating Automation

Loupe is proud to announce our newest product, Shuv — which enables you to push updates automatically to any system, from anywhere, with components that all live remotely. It’s CI/CD for PLCs, available now.

What you just witnessed was the deployment of a software update to thousands of machines — made automatically from a centralized location on the other side of the country.

You read that right: Our latest product, Shuv, allows you to push updates automatically to any system, from anywhere.

Now, we’re excited to share Shuv with the world.

Inspired by Software Development

This may sound too good to be true… but the fact is, this process already exists outside of our industry. Last night while you slept, your smartphone’s OS was updated. Today while you’re checking your email, your desktop applications are being improved in the background. Bugs are being fixed, features are being added, security fixes are closing vulnerabilities, and your experience is being enhanced, all without any action required from you. This is how the software world works: incremental improvements being made constantly, globally, with the push of a button.

Meanwhile, in the world of robotics, industrial control development has historically looked very different. Many updates today are sketchy and highly prone to human error. They often involve multiple steps, and can outright break or disable a machine (especially if they are attempted remotely). So, deploying updates has usually meant physically flying engineers around the country to interact with hardware in person — often inserting a thumb drive into a machine.

Not only was that process wildly inefficient, it also required travel expenses, time commitments, geographical considerations, waiting for maintenance windows, and so on. As a result, some updates could take a year to roll out, or weren’t made at all because their urgency was weighed against these logistical challenges. Some machines never even receive a software update at all after they’re first deployed.

That is, until now.

Introducing Shuv

If you’re familiar with Loupe, you know that we aim to bring the tools of modern software engineering to industrial automation and robotics. This is just one of many institutional behaviors that could benefit from revolutionary improvement.

Which is why we leveraged our NMC process to answer the question: What if updates could be built, tested, and deployed with no physical machine interaction? In other words, what if we could drive the cost of deploying an update to zero?

The result is Shuv — a new Loupe offering that pulls software updates from the cloud and deploys it directly onto B&R PLCs. Shuv allows you to push updates automatically to any system, from anywhere, with components that all live remotely.

How it Works:

Developer makes changes to codebase at a dev workstation and pushes the changes to Github.
The software is deployed to all machines via secure cloud connections.
(There is no step 3. It really is that simple.)

Shuv-ing the Industry Forward

The name “Shuv” is inspired by the process of pushing updates automatically, but also by our belief that this innovation is long overdue for our industry. If your smartphone didn’t have this functionality, it would be considered obsolete — and likewise, this capability should become a base requirement for all industry software moving forward.

Other benefits include:

Make geography irrelevant
Reduce cost of deployment
Reduce time to deployment (deliver products earlier since you know you have a way to evolve it)
Maximize talent potential (from 1 burned out onsite engineer to 10 around the country)
Secure equipment by always running the latest versions of vendor and application software
Improve machine performance with more regular bug fixes
And more…

Try It Today

This is no longer just an interesting hypothetical; it’s happening at Loupe now. We’re excited to roll it out to our clients and imagine the possibilities together. If you’d like to revolutionize your industrial control development, we’d love to chat with you.

Shuv is currently available for early access, and space is limited. Please tell us about yourself and we’ll email you as soon as your spot is open! Register now at shuv.team.